Evangelistic Mushrooms

HI All,

So much has happened. We should write more often...
When Galina left she took with her the Russian tranlation of "Resurrection Factor". She said that she couldn't put it down and read the whole thing in a few hours. I'd asked her to read it and give me a review so that I could give it to Yura and Luda.

The whole Yura/Luda thing took an interesting turn when I went for an overnighter at their dacha. Other sauna pal, Sasha and his son Sergey and I went up on Tuesday morning. The plan was to hunt mushrooms (we never found any), do the sauna (which Yura built as an addition to the dacha) and sleep over.

We did all those things but the most interesting thing of all was that in the middle of it Luda told her own story of how, when she was 21 she died during an appendix operation. If you've ever heard life-after-life stories her's was eerily similar to the ones you've heard. She said that she was unconcious when they started to operate on her- she had her out of body event -and then woke up to the operation in progress. Only THEN did they give her anesthesia...so she knows it wasn't something drug-induced. This assured, dialectical-materialist kept her story to herself until some air of freedom began to blow around the USSR. Then she dared to let people know.
It happened 30 years ago and she remembers it like it was yesterday.

Well, as you can imagine this provided plenty of fuel for the 'meaning of life' discussion that occupied our time there.

Skipping ahead, Galina REALLY, REALLY recommended that I pass Resurrection Factor along to people with questions.

Oh, the Evangelistic Mushrooms? Well, this morning Kim and I arrived at the English-speakers church, (this was after we went to the Russian church with Sasha, who I thought had hated his first experience there). When we pulled up, there was a tall white mushroom growing next to the parking lot. I went to inspect it and found an additional bunch of small brown mushrooms growing.

Subsequently, during the worship service, a plan formed itself- take pictures and email them to Yura and then call and ask if they were edible or not. Turns out the white ones shouldn't even be touched if you can help it; the brown ones- edible but not desirable.

The real reason for calling Yura was just to make contact, say 'yo'- in Russian -and continue to keep lines of communication open.

Oh, and set up a time to go play tennis Monday morning so I can give him that book.

Thanks for keeping up with all this stuff. Have a good week